


One summer night, going to the pier

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [56]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:07:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29338788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: The mess gets straightened out.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [56]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	One summer night, going to the pier

It had already taken a week to get the apartment cleaned up, and there was no sign they were going home.

Or maybe it wasn't taking that long, maybe it all got done in half a day, and Sonny just decided he wanted stay at the St. Regis a little longer. Either way, Vinnie had no objections. Sonny hadn't gone to his office, he hadn't even brought his laptop—he'd locked it in the safe—which was unprecedented. They were taking a vacation.

Since moving to San Francisco, they hadn't done any sight-seeing the way they had in all of the other places they'd stayed. Most of the other places. For some reason, Sonny had insisted there wasn't anything in Idaho he could possibly want to see. Why Idaho in particular, Vinnie didn't know, so he went sight-seeing on his own . . . though from what he remembered, Sonny had been right. 

You couldn't really say that about San Francisco, so why hadn't they ever done any sight-seeing here? Maybe it was that they weren't **staying** in San Francisco, they were **living** here. They weren't visitors, so they didn't do touristy things. Sonny was the only native New Yorker Vinnie knew who ever went to the Empire State Building.

So it had surprised Vinnie when Sonny announced at breakfast the first morning that he wanted to ride a cable car.

Vinnie started to say something snarky, but then he changed his mind. "Sure. And after that, why don't we go to Fisherman's Wharf?"

Sonny gave him a sharp look—probably looking for sarcasm, but there wasn't any to be found, and Sonny grinned at him and agreed.

So they spent the day doing touristy stuff, including a little cruise around the bay, with a guide telling their group all about—something. Vinnie didn't hear most of it because Sonny had backed him into a secluded spot and stuck his hand down Vinnie's jeans, and he'd kept kissing him. It didn't occur to Vinnie to object to this, not only because he was enjoying it, but because it was so unreal. Every so often Vinnie had to open his eyes to be sure it really was Sonny, because even though Sonny's hands and Sonny's mouth were as familiar to Vinnie as Sonny's voice, **Sonny Steelgrave** did not kiss guys in public, and he certainly didn't feel them up where anybody might see him doing it. But it was him, every time.

Vinnie suggested they take a trip to Alcatraz, but Sonny only laughed and said, "You're still trying to get me inside a prison, after all these years? Give it up, man, it's not gonna happen. You got nothing on me." So they went to Chinatown instead, which of course didn't stand up to New York's Chinatown, not in Sonny's estimation.

After the touristy stuff, they went back to the hotel for the one ritual that Sonny had been insisting on for years: watching _Jeopardy!_

Vinnie liked _Jeopardy!,_ but not half as much as Sonny, who didn't play (though he did heckle the contestants mercilessly), but who seemed to get a real vicarious kick out of Vinnie's expertise at the game. It was weird, wasn't it, that Sonny should be so enamored of something like his vocabulary, or his knowledge of US history? It was a hold-over from the old days when Sonny had been so happy to have found himself a driver who was really smart.

The _Jeopardy!_ thing had started back in Norfolk. They had been watching TV one evening, switching back and forth between a basketball game and some Rita Hayworth movie that was showing on the local station. The movie ended while they were watching the game, and when Sonny switched stations, _Jeopardy!_ was on. He left it on—they'd been going back and forth to avoid commercials—and Alex Trebek had asked a question that went something like, "The inability to feel joy or happiness, it was also the working title of the movie _Annie Hall._ " Vinnie had known, of course—it was anhedonia, and he knew it was from the Greek, and he further knew that that was what he was experiencing at that moment, though he'd left that part out of his answer. Sonny had positively lit up when Vinnie'd given this answer, along with a breakdown of the word itself. Sonny loved the stuff he could do.

It had taken Vinnie a long time to understand how Sonny thought of him. It wasn't that he thought Vinnie belonged to him; he saw Vinnie as a part of himself . . . in some way he saw Vinnie **as** himself. Vinnie had always thought that Sonny declaring him **his** was a rationalization, a way to avoid having to do what he knew he was supposed to do to a cop who'd infiltrated his organization, but Vinnie had been wrong. It wasn't rationalization to look in the mirror and claim the reflection as your own.

It explained, too, something Vinnie had never been able to wrap his mind around: Sonny and the fusebox. When he'd thought Vinnie'd betrayed him, Sonny had refused to kill him. His response had been to send Vinnie away, with the fantasy of Vinnie's death passing for the real thing. Finding out he was a cop, that he'd been a fake all along, had been a different matter entirely. That person Sonny had seen as his mirror image had turned into a stranger right before his eyes. Throwing himself into a fusebox didn't seem like such an over-reaction anymore.

It was ironic, really, that Sonny'd never understood how Vinnie couldn't bring himself to look in the mirror when his mood fell so low—Vinnie had found out he wasn't the man he'd thought he was, either.

He'd found he could live with it, though.

Vinnie had never told Sonny that when they watched _Jeopardy!,_ he always thought about Matt Stemkowski, about how he'd considered giving up murdering women in favor of moving to California and being on _Jeopardy!,_ and what would Vinnie's life have been like if he had?

Well, Stemkowski wouldn't have been there to recreate Sonny's death and throw Vinnie into a tailspin, and hadn't that been when the nightmare had really started? Because if Vinnie hadn't run out on Frank and shot two men who'd been sent to kill him, if he'd never stood looking over the side of a bridge while all the voices of all the people whose deaths he felt responsible for told him to jump, if he hadn't—

Well, he would still have been working, for one thing. Maybe not undercover, but he would have been working, and he wouldn't have been able to go looking for Tommy Gallagher, and no El Salvador, no Sonny, no San Francisco hotel room watching _Jeopardy!_ and thinking of Sheriff Stemkowski.

It hadn't exactly been true, what Vinnie had told Tracy about Sonny not being interested in the past. Sonny wasn't interested in his own past, or at least he wasn't interested in talking about it.

But Vinnie's past fascinated him. He'd heard of Mel Profitt, and was unflaggingly captivated by Vinnie's stories of the parties and the craziness. He knew all the players on the Commission, of course, and seemed completely unsurprised to hear that Vinnie had held his own sitting at their table. He seemed to know a good deal about what had happened to Vinnie at the hands of Masters and Strichen, but Vinnie had the feeling he might have told Sonny about that early on, before he realized Sonny was really there. They didn't talk much about that, anyway.

But what Sonny most seemed to enjoy hearing about was Vinnie's stint running Dead Dog Records. Again, he knew the players, and Vinnie realized that shouldn't have surprised him.

Finding talent for the Royal Diamond was something Sonny had really enjoyed, and it wasn't surprising that record company executives had found their way to the casino to sign that talent, or that Sonny had gotten to know a lot of them. Joey Romanowski had signed with TrueHeart Records, which Bobby Travis had been the senior VP in charge of talent and acquisitions for. Wasn't it a small world?

And Sonny took Vinnie's short-lived engagement to Amber very personally. Not in a jealous way, but in that disturbingly empathetic way he sometimes had. He'd actually tried to keep it from Vinnie when he'd read in the paper that Amber had gotten married last year; he really seemed to expect Vinnie to be broken-hearted by this, which made Vinnie wonder just how disappointed Sonny really was about losing Theresa. Though as far as Vinnie knew, Theresa had never gotten married. Sonny never talked about her, and except for one time, Vinnie never asked.

Sonny enjoyed hearing all the details of Sid Royce's death, and was only sorry Vinnie had not been the one to pull the trigger. He never understood that Vinnie's offer to do it had had nothing to do with vengeance and everything to do with Frank. Well, almost nothing to do with vengeance.

Vinnie knew that he wasn't supposed to talk about any of this stuff, that it was probably all classified, but who was Sonny going to tell?

They ate lunch out, but they had dinner in the room every night, and it was strange how nice it was, staying in a hotel room and watching TV together, acting like strangers to the city they lived in. It was kind of weird, being on vacation, since Vinnie wasn't doing anything anyway, but it was nice. He enjoyed spending time with Sonny. They stayed up late every night, talking about their childhoods, which were scarily similar, laughing about ways to cut school, cop a feel, skip Mass. Sonny had been damn inventive about all of those things, even if he hadn't been any more successful than Vinnie had.

Vinnie was wondering how long they were going to stay at the hotel, which led to wondering how much it was costing, which led to something he'd been kind of thinking about for a while, which was why, when they were out wandering around one day, he stopped in front of a toy store.

"Guy was an idiot! He didn't believe in selling condoms—good, Catholic boy, you know, so he didn't stock the machine. So of course the machine never put out, not that that ever stopped a guy from sticking a quarter in. And he said nobody ever complained or asked for his money back—of course! Who the hell ever complained because a condom machine didn't put out?"

"Nobody," Vinnie agreed. "Probably mostly only kids who ever use 'em now, and they'd be too embarrassed."

"Yeah! Yeah, that's right, so—" Sonny looked around, suddenly realizing they'd stopped walking. "Why're we standing here?"

"I need to get something," Vinnie said. "Finish your story first."

"You need to get something in a toy store?" Sonny asked. "What, did you run out of tinker toys?"

"Will you finish your story? Why was the guy an idiot?"

"Listen," Sonny laughed, and Vinnie knew whatever he was going to say, he thought it was pretty funny, "you buy anything in there that wets or cries, you'll be sleeping with it in your car."

Vinnie pushed him against the wall, leaned against him, and violated his mouth, roughly. When Vinnie released him, Sonny looked just the way Vinnie liked him best: blushing and furious, and ready to slug him. "Like you'd ever let me sleep anyplace you weren't," he said, and kissed Sonny some more, until he knew it was time to stop. "Now will you finish your story?"

Sonny was smiling at him like he'd just invented fire or something. "What story?"

"The guy with the condom machine! Jesus, keep up."

"Oh, yeah, him. Moron took the machine out! He was making a clear profit of twenty, sometimes thirty bucks a month—no taxes, no nothing, all he's gotta do is open the machine and take the money out, so what does he do? He takes the machine out! Fucking moron."

Vinnie laughed, took Sonny's mouth again, let him go. "Wait here. Try not to get in any trouble." He removed Sonny's hand from his ass and went in the store, pausing to ask if Sonny wanted him to get him anything?

Sonny's answer was one digit long.

"Hey, just for that, I'm not gonna bring you back a surprise."

"What do you think you're doing with those?" Vinnie asked, extracting two five dollar bills from Sonny's hand.

"I was getting change," Sonny said, very slowly, as though explaining a very difficult concept to a very slow child. "Two fives for one ten."

"What ten? You didn't put anything in the bank."

"You must not have been paying attention," Sonny said, making a grab for the fives, but Vinnie held them out of reach.

"Look, I'm the banker. That means you have no business putting anything in or taking anything out. You need change, you give me the ten, I give you the fives."

"What do you mean, you're you the banker? You don't know anything about banking, you can barely fill out a deposit slip—"

"I'm perfectly capable— There are no deposit slips, this is a game!"

"Yeah, so who the hell cares if I end up with a couple of extra pink five dollar bills that aren't worth a thing on the open market?"

"There isn't any point in playing a game if there aren't any rules. Without rules, all you have is anarchy." Vinnie tapped the word MONOPOLY in the middle of the board. "Does that say anarchy?"

"You and that anarchy thing again. Lemme tell you, me lifting a couple of fives outta the kitty isn't anarchy, it's how the game is really played," Sonny said.

"You mean like, rules were made to be broken?"

"Of course not; that really would be anarchy. No, rules were made to be circumvented."

"Rules were made to be circumvented?" Vinnie repeated. "How is that different from broken?"

Sonny sighed. "Most people aren't smart enough to circumvent the rules, and for them you gotta have rules, because stupid people doing whatever they want **is** anarchy. But if you're smart enough to figure out how to get around the rules and not get caught, you've got a, whatchacallit, a moral imperative to do it."

Vinnie wondered how it was he had come to be living with someone with a philosophy like this. He almost thought about what a philosophical conversation between Sonny and Mel would have been like, but he caught himself before his head exploded. And he stopped himself from arguing, since he'd never convince Sonny anyway. "And you it gives you a better shot at winning, right?"

"Yeah, exactly." Sonny started to take the two fives back.

Vinnie smacked his hand. "Really, genius? Because I just caught you with those two fives, which don't belong to you. And what that means is," he picked up the cannon that was Sonny's playing piece and dropped it on the Jail square, "Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars."

"Hey! What do you think you're doing?" Sonny grabbed his cannon off the board, holding it protectively.

"You said if you were smart enough to figure out how to get around the rules, you had a better shot at winning than somebody playing by the rules, and that's true. But there's a corollary to that: if you get caught, you got a better shot at losing than somebody playing by the rules. And you just got caught."

"You're pretty touchy about your pink and blue play money," Sonny observed.

Vinnie wasn't sure why he was so offended by that remark, but he had to take a couple of deep breaths and tell himself it wasn't worth a fight before he could let it go—and not point out that Sonny was pretty touchy about his little cannon. "It's a game," he said again. "If you're not going to play by the rules, there's no point playing at all."

"Since when do we have a banker?" Sonny asked.

"The rules say—"

" **What** rules?" Sonny demanded. "What're you talking about?" Vinnie picked up the box, but before he could say anything, Sonny said, "Wait. We're playing by their rules? Since when? We never play by their rules."

That was true. He and Sonny had played Monopoly a few times when they'd been in AC, while Sonny was recuperating from his gunshot wounds. Sonny had been delighted to find someone else who thought the best way to play Monopoly was to cheat and try not to get caught.

_Things are different now. I'm a cop—_

_No, you're not. You used to be a cop, once upon a time. Besides, you were a cop then, too._

_Sonny didn't know then._

_So what are you, his board game conscience? There's a lofty position._

Sonny was looking at him, waiting for an explanation he didn't have. "It's all about following the rules now?" Sonny asked, and he sounded disappointed.

Vinnie felt as though he might drown in that disappointment, choke on the guilt that had tried for so long to kill him, and be swept away by Sonny's feelings of betrayal. _Well, you don't cure yourself of depression by spending a few hours in a parking garage with Frank; if that was all it took, everybody'd be doing it._

But Vinnie refused to let himself spiral down. "It's been a long time since we played by those rules we made up," he told Sonny.

"Yeah?" Sonny asked cautiously. Vinnie understood that he was afraid, too; he was afraid of that us-vs.-them line, the one Vinnie seemed to step back and forth over for reasons Sonny never understood.

Vinnie shrugged. Now was the time to take the plunge. "Frank an' me used to play, and when he'd catch me lifting money from the bank, he'd tell me we weren't playing by Steelgrave Rules." Sonny burst out laughing, and he didn't even say anything nasty about Frank. "You wanna talk about rules—he threw away the Get Out of Jail Free cards because he didn't believe in getting out of jail free."

"Figures," Sonny snorted, then he asked, "You wanna do that?" overwhelming Vinnie for a moment. Vinnie could stand on whichever side of the line he wanted, as long as he took Sonny with him.

"I'm thinking I want to play a different game," Vinnie said meaningfully.

Sonny raised his eyebrows. "Yeah? I think I know that one. You haven't changed the rules, have you?"

"Not for a while," Vinnie said.

Sonny was sleeping, one hand holding Vinnie's left leg, his fingers curled against his thigh. Things weren't going exactly the way Vinnie had planned, but he had to admit, this detour hadn't been bad at all. Sometimes he had the idea he didn't really know Sonny, but at least that didn't scare him the way it scared Sonny when he had the same thought.

He had an idea he wanted to run past Sonny, but he knew what he wanted to suggest was as antithetical to Sonny's outlook on life as going around telling people they were sleeping together was—maybe even more. The Monopoly game was supposed to be an object lesson; instead they'd gotten derailed by the fundamental differences Vinnie kept forgetting they had. Or maybe they didn't really, and Vinnie just kept insisting they did, in an effort to remember who he was in the equation.

_You don't need to do that anymore, remember?_

Things would be different in the morning. And really, starting a Monopoly game at ten thirty at night was pretty stupid. They were neither of them that good at staying up all night anymore. He got cranky, and Sonny got silly.

Sonny's hand moved up, probably just an involuntary sleep movement, but Vinnie wasn't asleep, and Sonny haphazardly groping his groin wasn't going help him relax any. Vinnie moved his hand back down and held it there.

He could feel the scars on Sonny's palm, the ones that had been caused by the electricity that hadn't killed him—hadn't permanently killed him, anyway.

It was funny, Vinnie felt those scars all the time, but he never thought about them or what they meant. A certain slant of autumn light could send him back to that day, and sometimes the sound of helicopters overhead would do it, but this direct result—did nothing to him. He held Sonny's hand, fingers twined together.

When Vinnie got up in the morning, Sonny was sitting at the table, drinking a glass of orange juice, looking at the Monopoly detritus. He was surprised to see that Vinnie was dressed already. "Sleep well?" he asked, and laughed.

"Yeah, I slept great. How about you?"

"Never better."

"Glad to hear it." Vinnie took the orange juice from him and drained the glass. "Thanks. I gotta go out for a while."

Sonny grabbed his wrist. "Hey, hey, kid, hold on. If it means that much to you—" He lifted up his side of the board and took out three five hundred dollar bills that he'd secreted there. "Here."

Vinnie just looked at him, then he started laughing.

"Hey, I'm giving them back, aren't I? I told you, I'll play it straight!"

"You are certifiable," Vinnie said, then leaned over and kissed Sonny.

The money was a mess.

Vinnie had stopped putting it in neat little stacks some time ago, and now it was jumbled everywhere. All he did was shove as much of it as he could into the briefcase Roger brought it in, and stuff the rest in the briefcase he'd picked up on his way over to the bank. It exploded like a trick can of peanuts when he opened it on the bed.

Sonny was staring at it. "What the fuck? Did you go out and rob a bank?" he asked, the unspoken _without me?_ tickling Vinnie immensely.

Vinnie jingled his keys at Sonny. "Safety deposit box, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah, but— How much is there?"

Vinnie shrugged. "I don't know. There was two million, two hundred and sixty three thousand, seven hundred dollars to start with, but I've been using it to buy cigarettes with."

Sonny picked up a stack of thousands. "Jesus fuck. They don't even print these anymore."

"Yeah, I know. Makes spending them kind'a tough."

"You've been buying a carton of cigarettes with thousand dollar bills?" Sonny asked. He couldn't have sounded any more appalled if Vinnie had said he'd been lighting his cigarettes with thousand dollar bills.

"No, dummy, hundreds. I had the bank change the thousands into fifties."

Sonny nodded. He looked like he was in shock, or maybe in love.

"Help me sort it out will you?" Vinnie asked.

Vinnie sat on the bed and Sonny sat on the floor. They sorted, counted, double-checked each other, and Sonny put rubber bands around each stack of a hundred bills.

Sonny got a little giddy, and at one point he burst out laughing. "You spend your days laundering millions of real dollars, but you got the nerve to complain about me swiping some play money?"

"Yeah? So?"

Sonny just laughed some more.

Eventually even the extravagance of handling all that money got boring, and Sonny called room service for sandwiches, and Vinnie turned on the basketball game. When they finished eating, they went back to counting. 

When they were finished, Vinnie took out his wallet, added what was there to the stacks of bills. Then he took the money he'd gotten from Rudy out and set it aside, explaining, "This is Rudy's, it doesn't enter into things."

"What things? Sonny asked.

"I'll get to that. And this is how much I had that you gave me," Vinnie said, taking out that money. You want it back?"

"Want it— No! What kind'a question's that, want it back? I gave it to you!"

"OK, OK, forget I asked." Vinnie put the money back on the bed. "OK, this is the kitty."

Sonny looked at him blankly.

"No five hundreds, but I think we can make do without them," and he laughed a little dizzily. There was so fucking **much** of it.

"What are you talking about?"

"The new Monopoly rules. The first rule is, real stakes. And whoever wins the game gets to keep their winnings."

Sonny was frowning at him. "That doesn't make any sense."

"What do you mean?" If there was one part of this he'd thought Sonny would like, it was the making a profit part.

"I mean, the money's yours. If you win, the best you can do is come out even, so why play at all?"

"Yeah, I know, but so what? It's not like I could lose all of it, or if I did, like you'd let me starve."

Sonny seemed to accept this. "OK, so what else you got? No Get Out of Jail Free cards?"

"Yeah, no more of them, but also no more Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars cards."

"So you're abolishing jail? I like it."

"No, I'm changing the way you get sent to jail. There won't be a banker, but anybody caught cheating goes to jail. And no getting out by rolling doubles. You want out, it'll cost you a thousand dollars."

Sonny was grinning. Vinnie knew these new rules wouldn't stop him from cheating. In fact, they'd probably make him cheat more. Sonny loved a challenge. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. We start off dead broke."

"Just like real life," Sonny said approvingly.

"You got it."

Things got off to a rocky start, due to circumstances Vinnie hadn't foreseen, and they had to keep starting the game over. Once it was because Vinnie landed on Luxury Tax his first time around the board and couldn't pay. Sonny had just made it past Go, so he cleared two hundred dollars, which simply delighted him.

The other problems all arose from Sonny ending up in jail, or not ending up there.

The first game they played, Vinnie caught him lifting a hundred from the bank the very first time around the board. With no funds to pay his way out of jail, and no prospects, the game ended.

Sonny learned quickly, though. For one thing, as far as Vinnie could tell, he never stole anything smaller than a thousand. That's what Vinnie caught him with in the game that came after the one he lost to Luxury Tax. He dropped the little pewter cannon on the Jail square. "You don't have any assets," Vinnie said, "so I guess we—"

Sonny pulled a thousand dollar bill out from under his side of the board. "There you go."

"Where did you get that?" Vinnie asked. Like he didn't know.

"None'a your business," Sonny answered.

"You've only been around the board once! You can't possibly have a thousand dollars yet—and you bought Virginia Avenue!"

"What's your point?" Sonny asked placidly, picking up the dice.

"My point is, you can't get yourself out of jail with stolen money," Vinnie said, trying not to yell.

"Why not?"

"Because—"

"Besides," Sonny interrupted, "you can't prove I stole it. Did you see me take it?"

"No, but how else could you have gotten it?"

"Hey, that's not the point. I don't have to account for where my money comes from; the name of the game is Monopoly, remember?" He tapped the name on the board. "Not IRS."

Vinnie couldn't exactly argue with that. "How much more have you got under there?" Vinnie asked, trying to lift Sonny's side of the board, but Sonny smacked his hand.

"Hey! You got a warrant?" he asked, and grinned at his unintended joke.

Vinnie knew Sonny was cheating; he bought property Vinnie knew he couldn't afford. But it took a ridiculously long time for Sonny to realize out that Vinnie was cheating, too. He figured it out when Vinnie charged him rent for landing on the Reading Railroad.

"You don't own that."

Vinnie held up the deed. "I own 'em all, pal. Two hundred dollars."

"What do you mean, you own them all? Since when do you— You couldn't possibly have gotten enough saved to— You've never even landed on Short Line!"

"Yeah?" Vinnie asked. "Prove it! Now pay up."

Sonny grabbed up Vinnie's deeds, shuffled through them. "Vermont, St. James— You don't own— You've been stealing **property**?" Sonny sounded both outraged by this, and overwhelmed with pride. "Who steals—nobody steals property!"

"Sonny, I've **always** stolen property. I was stealing property back in Atlantic City, you were just too busy stealing cash to notice."

Sonny was grinning harder than Vinnie had ever seen him, shaking his head. "Kid, you are—" And he burst out laughing.

Sonny offered to give back the money he'd stolen, if Vinnie wanted him to, and they could play it completely straight. Vinnie turned him down, but from then on they did play an aboveboard, if cut-throat game that lasted two days. Sonny won, but just barely, and the victory made him so happy he insisted on giving Vinnie back half of his winnings. "Partner, right? So you get half. Go get dressed."

Vinnie looked down at himself. "I thought I was dressed. I look dressed to me."

"Idiot. Go put on your blue suit. We'll put your money back in the box, then I'm taking you out for dinner."

Dinner was five courses in the most extravagant place Sonny could think of. His mood was as bubbly as the champagne he kept ordering, and Vinnie had a great time watching him. He couldn't imagine things working out better than they had. Over dessert, Vinnie started laying out his plan.

"Sonny, I've got an idea."

Laughing, Sonny interrupted him. "I am **not** playing Clue with you, man, I told you that. Besides, with this new real world rules thing'a yours, we'd hafta find a real dead guy, and figure out who killed him."

Vinnie laughed. "No, this is a real thing, not a game. I'm going to give away the money Roger gave me."

Sonny snorted a laugh. "What, you like those pink and blue bills better?"

Vinnie laughed. "Yeah, I like the pretty play money. No, I told you, I've got a plan."

"A plan that would work better if you didn't have so much money? What kind of plan is it, you wanna go on the dole?"

"No, I wanna open a garage."

"And you think that'd go better if you weren't saddled with a small fortune?" Sonny couldn't seem to stop laughing. "What's the matter with you?"

"That's not why I want to give away the money. Sonny, I'm serious about this."

Sonny sobered a little, but his good mood didn't fade any. He poured them both a little more champagne. "I know you are, kid. What's your plan?"

"You know why this game of Monopoly was so much fun?" Vinnie asked.

"Yeah, 'cause I won a quarter of a mil doing nothing more than moving a little cannon around a game board." Sonny reached into his pocket and pulled out the token, set it on the table next to his plate. He'd started carrying it around like a good luck charm.

"The money was part of it," Vinnie agreed. "It gave the game weight. There were real consequences, and by starting with no money, it was a real challenge. It wasn't cinch to win."

Sonny nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean."

"I think the money— Sonny, the money's been a godsend, you having it, and using it to take care of me, I wouldn't change any'a that. But we're not running anymore, we're not on the lam, we're not even hiding, really. I'm not suggesting we should be paupers, but—wouldn't it be great if you felt this good when you made some money at work?"

"You mean you want me to give away my money, too?" Even this suggestion didn't touched Sonny's good mood; he was still half-laughing through his words.

"That's what I was thinking, yeah." He could have gone on, told Sonny that this was why they were so bored so much of the time, that not having too much money would make the things they did and bought more fun, but he kept quiet and let Sonny think about it.

Sonny sipped his champagne. "I get what you mean," he said, and he said it so carefully, Vinnie was sure he was going to say no. Instead he signaled to the waiter and ordered them some espresso. "You want another one'a those tortes?" he asked, motioning at Vinnie's empty dessert plate. "We could split one," he added. Vinnie was about to say no, but Sonny went on, "Those things don't grow on trees, you know."

They didn't talk about it anymore until they were in the elevator, going back to their hotel room. "I'll make you a deal. I'm gonna keep my money right where it is—" Sonny put his hand on Vinnie's arm, as though to keep him from interrupting, though Vinnie hadn't been about to. "But we won't use it."

"What do you mean?"

"Look, you remember when I told you I got a Swiss bank account, and why it was so important to have a lot of money?"

"In case something happened," Vinnie agreed. "I get that."

"Yeah. It's an insurance policy. I can't just hand it over to the United Way; what if something happened, what if we needed it?" Vinnie had no argument for that, but even if he had, Sonny was still talking. "But I'll make you a compromise. I'll stop withdrawing the interest. We'll treat it like a real insurance policy." The elevator stopped on their floor, and they got off and went to their room. Inside, before Sonny could turn on the light, Vinnie kissed him.

Then the light came on. "Who were you thinking of giving your money to?"

"I dunno. There's enough of it, could be a lot of groups. And I don't know what would happen if I gave it all to one place, that kind'a money could raise some red flags, end up causing them problems. But a few grand, that should be OK. Some to St. Dismis, they could use it."

Sonny nodded. "Yeah, great idea. Why don't you give 'em my half, too?"

Vinnie started to say something, but he couldn't. Instead, he kissed Sonny.

That was their last night at the St. Regis. The apartment was done, had been done for a while, and Sonny said they couldn't afford to keep staying there, not on his budget. Vinnie had the feeling it wasn't going to be the last time he'd hear that particular phrase, but he didn't think he'd get tired of it.

They hadn't been there to watch _Jeopardy!,_ but Sonny had taped it. It was late when they got back to the room, and even later when Sonny nudged Vinnie. "You wanna watch _Jeopardy!_?"

Vinnie laughed. "You're crazy, you know that?"

"Why?"

"Nothin', no reason. Can we still afford for me to call down to room service?"

"You got money," Sonny said. "You can do whatever you want with it."

Vinnie got the strangest feeling when Sonny said that, the lightest, airiest feeling he could ever remember having.

"You know what, you're right." He got up, pulled his jogging pants back on, then went to the phone and called room service. Sonny was up, putting on his robe, rewinding the tape. "Don't watch the end first," Vinnie said.

"Hey! I never cheat at _Jeopardy!,_ you know that."

"You want anything?" Vinnie asked, knowing the answer: Sonny would share whatever Vinnie got. So Vinnie ordered all the appetizers on the menu, and two of the desserts.

_Jeopardy!_ was over, and the food was all gone, and Sonny was lying half on top of Vinnie. Vinnie felt around, found the remote, and shut off the TV. Sonny was feeling around inside Vinnie's jogging pants, not really feeling Vinnie up, just casually fondling him. Things were very good.

"Is there anything you want to talk about?" Sonny asked Vinnie, then kissed him before he could answer. Vinnie was pretty sure he was talking about Tony deVoss. He knew what Sonny thought had happened, and for a moment he considered telling him what had really happened, the nothing that had happened, but did it matter? Sonny already thought the worst, and here they were, lying in bed in a fancy hotel, Sonny wanting him so hard he couldn't keep his hands off him, even though there was no way either of them was up to a second feature. Sonny just enjoyed wanting him, enjoyed touching him just because he could.

"Can't think of a thing," Vinnie said.

Sonny didn't ask again. Things were very good.


End file.
